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Microbial Mats from Wind Flats of the Southern Baltic Sea

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Microbial Mats

Part of the book series: Cellular Origin, Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology ((COLE,volume 14))

Abstract

The Baltic Sea covers an area of 377,000 km² and is the world’s largest brackish-water ecosystem. In geological terms, the Baltic Sea is quite young and its development began with the thawing of the Weichselian ice sheet after the last glaciation 15,000 years BP (before present). Because the connection to the North Sea was mostly temporary, the salinity conditions changed often. For the last 8,000 years BP, the salinity regime remained more or less unchanged and brackish (Björck, 1995). The catchment area is 1.6 million square kilometers. The annual input of riverine and precipitation freshwater is about 660 km3, while further 475 km3 of saline water flows in from the North Sea. The discharge of brackish water into the North Sea over the small straits between Denmark and Sweden averages 950 km3 (Björck, 1995). Apart from these small connections, the Baltic Sea is surrounded by land. This has a great impact on the salinity regime. Through the inflow of saline bottom water from the North Sea, salty and oxygen-rich water is delivered. Thus, the salinity of the freshwater-influenced surface water decreases from 25–15 PSU in the western part, to 8–6 PSU in the central Baltic Sea and down to 2 PSU in the Bottnian Gulf in the north–east (Matthäus, 1996). Therefore, the Baltic Sea can be characterized as a very large estuary. Despite this horizontal salinity gradient, the conditions in the Baltic Sea are very different from those in estuaries because of missing tides. The tidal range is extremely low with 12–15 cm, but wind direction and wind speed may temporarily induce high waves and change sea water levels (Brosin, 1965; Lass and Magaard, 1996). Consequently, salinity levels at any point do not vary much, resulting in a rather stable vertical salinity gradient, but strong horizontal salinity gradients along the shore line structure the benthic fauna and flora profoundly.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Biological Sciences, Applied Ecology, University of Rostock, D-18057, Rostock, Germany

    Kerstin Heyl, Jana Woelfel, Rhena Schumann & Ulf Karsten

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  1. Kerstin Heyl
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Correspondence to Kerstin Heyl .

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  1. University of Jerusalem, Mevo Hadas 20, Efrat, 90435, Israel

    Joseph Seckbach

  2. Inst. Life Sciences, Div. Microbial and Molecular Ecology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Givat Ram Campus, Jerusalem, 91 904, Israel

    Aharon Oren

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Heyl, K., Woelfel, J., Schumann, R., Karsten, U. (2010). Microbial Mats from Wind Flats of the Southern Baltic Sea. In: Seckbach, J., Oren, A. (eds) Microbial Mats. Cellular Origin, Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3799-2_16

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